I agree, why should they have a desire, to spreed or take over the world at all, it is a survival instinct, which they need not have.

The problem is that once a AI becomes self aware, what ever that means, it will be able to, evolve beyond what we have programmed.

In all these scenarios we credit them with super intelligence the ability to break into any system, out think us, but do not credit them with the ability to show compassion, or accept the need to diversity. I believe compassion is necessary trait in order to work well in a community. Even humans in our greed still realize that destroying other life is not beneficial, we try to protect sharks, tigers, ... even though they pose a small threat. If machines truly become that intelligent we will only pose a small threat as well.

In the end the universe is an incredibly large place, and if we develop true, self replicating/ repairing AI, we will greatly expand our ability for space travel. Surely the universe is a big enough place for all of us. Possibly a highly intelligent life form will be able to recognize this.

Car keys are another example. It costs $400 a key on my $20,000 car, it came with 2 so 4% of the value of the car was in the keys. It is cheaper to buy and install an alarm system, with 2 keys than to get a new key.

I love the free market it is great, but it only works if it has competition, which forces producers to reduce there price, and become more efficient. Copyright removes competition. As a result you get crazy prices like this.

So what you are saying you should hire the man right, because in my country New Zealand, it is illegal to grant a scholarship to a male based on gender but perfectly legal to do so for a woman, right?

A is worse, especially when it comes to sex. why?
1. You are not hiring the best qualified people, therefor making your company inefficient.
2. It is unfair, why should the current generation be punished, for the views of there ancestors.
3. It breeds animosity, and removes respect for preferred people hired under the scheme. E.g. even if a women is hired, because they where the most capable, there will be a level of doubt about it.

Why is A worse for sexual discrimination?
When it comes to sex there is no generational injustice here you don't need to compensate a woman for x hundred years of inequality. Or adjust for the fact that the family is poorer than they would have been if there parents where not discriminated against.

The only reason you would choose B, is if you are too focused on statistics. We need 50/50 distribution of men and women to be fair. The question is why? There are a lot of trained people in the industry from many years ago that are men, it is not efficient or even plausible, to loose the skills and train women to take their place. So the solution is to hire more women who are less qualified for new entries. Well once the old men leave the workplace you will have a glut of women. Then you will be subject the males in the future of the at best unintentional gender biases of the predominantly female faculty.

Statistics like any metric, are useful but should be taken with a grain of salt. You need to understand their limitations.

I don't quite understand the whole drive to have equal numbers men an women working in IT anyway, perhaps women just do not like that type of job, is it really in societies interest to force people into career paths that they don't enjoy, just for the sake of a statistic.

Initially maybe? but that will soon pass.

10% of the situations is an incredibly bad percentage, and there are levels of bad as well, humans are not good at making perfect decisions but they are usually good enough. You make many decisions when you drive, hundreds if not thousand, most of them unconscious, If you died 1 out 10 times you would probably not make it down a good size street.

Put it this way, if I died when my computer crashed, I would most certainly dead within a year.

We are moving back, but we will move forward again, as well. Civilization moves in cycles, we get better, the elite want more, take too much, society collapses, we rebuild. But in general the curve is up. I hope that this time the rich, see that they have enough (not holding my breath), and we won't have a major collapse. I can only hope.

Firefox and Chrome have very similar UIs, Any difference is minor. They have very similar performance from user perspective, and are both much better than IE.

I choose to use Firefox as my main browser, mainly because Google have enough control of the internet they don't need to own the browser too.

If Google wanted not to be evil (I know that's no longer one of their stated goals), then they wouldn't try to have their sticky fingers in everything.

That is quite the opposite to what I have seen, most problems I see, appear that the person who wrote it doesn't know what a function is, the same piece of code is repeated 5 or six times. Inevitably as changes occur all the versions don't get maintained which leads to bugs.

Like anything, you have to take the rule with a grain of salt, like any rule. It is not always possible to not repeat yourself, so if you are going to break the rule then you should have a good reason for it.

Repeating yourself, can also be unclear to someone reading your code, since they have to examine both parts and work out the differences, if there are any.

I have spent many hours comparing 2 sections of code line by line only to find out it varies by one parameter.

The revelation that if you do something really stupid, its going to be slower than if you don't, not isn't exactly a new revelation is it? They could have stuck solving the traveling salesman problem in memory before writing to disk to, but that too would not have yielded any new revelations.

Big O notation has been around in Computer Science since 1976, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation#cite_note-knuth-11) this is hardly new research.

They basically they didn't test the same thing,

They tested concatenating 1 byte, 10 byte and 1000 byte strings in memory and disk.

In java each time you append a string you allocate an new piece of memory and copy the old string into it. When you append do it on disk it will allocate the data in blocks. The the proper way of doing this type of operation in to use a StringBuffer or StringBuilder.

The string concatenation method is order n^2 where with pre -allocation and just appending it is order n. The whole thing about order is k*n^2 will always get slower than j*n, for a big enough value of n, no matter how much bigger j is than k.

So what they are saying is don't do really stupid stuff in memory or it could be slower than doing not so stupid stuff on disk. No shit.

Oh yes then they wrote the string out to disk in the memory test as well, effectively doing the same operation as disk only method. Just to be on the safe side so your operation in memory must be slower.

Either these "researchers" are stupid or just want to make the headlines.

Your experience of sex must be very different from mine. A very important part to me is that the woman enjoys it too.

The other parts well, are very general.

Arguably you do pretty much everything for your own purposes, even making someone else happy. You do it because you experience pleasure from there happiness.

If someone you want to have sex with refuses, what are you supposed to do? Not have sex ever again because no other man/woman will do? If you get no longer want to have sex with someone clearly they are not interchangeable since the old person will not do.

The only logical conclusion to this, only a very small number of people. If you are part of the 1% and think you are safe, then think again. Once you eliminate 99% guess what? The remaining 1% will split into rich and poor, its all relative. The middle class live like kings compared to what they did 200 years ago. The new 1% will start to become the ruling class, why would they need the poorer 99% when robots can do all the work? Its not like the 1% make money of the sweat of there bough anyway, they make it by taking their cut from the work of others. Rinse and repeat until no one is left. After all the richest person, doesn't need anyone to do the work since AI can do it all.

Or we all could realize, that we have enough, we don't need to endlessly increase our the amount of stuff we have. We now have enough resources for everyone to have a comfortable life. Our economic goal needs to change focus, from this endless drive to produce more so we can consume more, why? Statistics show that even the richest are better off when society is more equal. We have the capability to do this, the question is do we have the will power?

Write systems allow you to bypass them safely, like automatically spawn a VM to run the code in.

If you think about it, the question is a stupid one. Do you wish look at naked women? Warning there is a chance that something bad may happen to your computer.

The answer is clearly yes, they probably knew that before they started looking. People will risk a real virus that can kill them to have sex they not going to say no the risk of a computer virus.

Porn aside, every piece of software I install, is dangerous. Large companies can, and have installed thing that I would consider viruses on computers. Just because the software is signed doesn't mean anything apart from maker of the software was willing to pay the fee to get it signed. If only ran actually trusted, I would have to write every piece of software myself, effectively making my computer useless.

What we need is a virtual condom, (Ok back to the porn) effectively allowing us to run the software, and be safe doing it.

They maybe not voting of the facts now, but imagine making everyone vote, even the ones that can't even be bothered voting now.

My opinion you is they should be advertising, you don't know don't vote. Not the current attitude of its your democratic duty to vote. It is your democratic duty to make an INFORMED vote, if you can't be bothered being informed you should not vote.

Making everyone vote would only increase the uninformed vote.